A writer must “know and have an ever-present consciousness that this world is a world of fools and rogues… tormented with envy, consumed with vanity; selfish, false, cruel, cursed with illusions… He should free himself of all doctrines, theories, etiquettes, politics…” —Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?). “The nobility of the writer's occupation lies in resisting oppression, thus in accepting isolation” —Albert Camus (1913-1960). “What are you gonna do” —Bertha Brown (1895-1987).

Wednesday, October 19, 2016

Current Education Reform Is a Fraud by Christopher Chase

“…Since 2001, when George Bush’s ‘No Child Left
Behind’ policies were put into motion, we’ve experienced a nation-wide
obsession with assessment, ranking, testing, measuring, and quantifying both
students’ learning and teachers’ teaching. Teaching to the test and test
preparation have become a national priority; while art, poetry, music, sports,
creative projects, students inner lives and the professional expertise of
teachers have not.

“In 2007, Presidential hopeful
Barack Obama promised to change that, telling cheering members of the National
Education Association during a televised campaign speech, ‘Don’t tell us that the only way to teach a
child is to spend too much of a year preparing him to fill out a few bubbles on
a standardized test. We know that’s not true. You didn’t devote your lives to
testing, you devoted it to teaching! And teaching is what you should be allowed
to do!’

“Obama had sought advice from Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond,
a Stanford University education researcher, with expertise and knowledge of
learner-centered practices and school reforms that had been successful with
children living in poverty. With Darling-Hammond as his primary education
advisor, Obama’s message was finely tuned, and in the 2008 election he was able
to get the full support of America’s teachers.

“What professional educators and the
American public did not realize at that time, was that whispering in his ear
was Obama’s advisor Rahm
Emanuel, whose many Wall Street connections included a group of hedge
fund investors running a campaign financing organization called Democrats
for Education Reform (DFER).

“From what we know now, it appears
that they were using President Obama as a kind of Trojan horse, with a
hidden agenda, more in line with President Bush’s administration than with the
innovative education models that Prof. Darling-Hammond was familiar
with, such as the Mission Hill
School piloted by Dr. Deborah Meier or the Comer School
Development Development Program developed at Yale.

“The goal of DFER’s Wall Street
supporters was to ride into power under Obama’s wings, so that they could
take control of the U.S. Department of Education, and then enact even more
regressive policies than Bush had put in place, as part of the
program Race to the
Top (RTTT). Once in power they would set in place policies that used ‘rigorous’
standards, high-stakes tests, teacher assessments and other punitive practices
to take away teachers’ local autonomy and reduce the number of public schools
in America, while enlarging the role of centralized testing companies and
increasing the opportunities for charter schools to make a profit.

“Their duplicity has been described
in the book ‘Class
Warfare’ by Steven Brill, and DFER’s director Joe Williams bragged about
their success, in a document put
out (behind the scenes) during Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign: ‘[Governors] of both parties nationwide have
been empowered by the ‘cover’ that has come from a Democratic President who has
been willing to embrace reforms that are not always in line with the priorities
of the nation’s powerful teachers unions. The evidence of what this shift in a
political messenger can bring is clear-cut. As a result of the RTTT
competition, fifteen states lifted caps on the creation of new charter schools,
and one state enacted a charter school law. Charter schools flourished more
under three years of Obama than under eight years of George W. Bush. Funding
for state charter school grants, for example, stayed between about $68 million
and $81 million during Bush’s two terms, but jumped to $138 million during Obama’s
first full budget year.’

“After (or perhaps before) Obama was
elected, his Wall Street connected advisors convinced him to ‘throw’ education
expert Linda Darling-Hammond ‘under the bus,’ as radio journalist Dr.
James Miller put it, placing a non-educator charter school supporter
named Arne
Duncan into the top position of the Dept. of Education.

“Duncan had aggressively supported punitive measures, public
school closings, standardized testing and charter school expansion in Chicago.
He is connected to a billionaire ‘venture philanthropist’ named Eli Broad, who had created a ‘leadership’
training school called the Broad
Academy, that exists outside of education. Over the last decade, Broad has
been able to put hundreds of pro-testing, pro-charter graduates in leadership
positions as superintendents, education department staff and school principals
across the nation.

“After Duncan was appointed as
head of the U.S. Department of Education, a charter school investment executive
named Joanne
Weisswas put in charge of developing the Race to the Top program. Once
this was in place, they were able to exert control
over state and district public school systems, implementing policy
changes rooted in greater testing, ranking, teacher assessment, school closings
and other policies that would increase the flow of public tax funds into the
pockets of testing service companies and charter schools’ private investors.
This was done even though there are laws which
prohibit the Federal government from controlling the nation’s educational
policies.

“Once in power, Duncan also teamed up with Microsoft’s Bill
Gates, working with an organization called Achieve to
create the Common Core standards by which all the children in America could be
assessed, measured, ranked and compared to one another. These standards,
amazingly enough, were not based on current research or innovative and
successful practices in education, but instead re-booted a method
of teaching from the Cold War era called ‘New Criticism,’ favored
by David Coleman – the so-called ‘architect’ of Common Core.

“New Criticism’s pedagogy fit well
with the Core’s testing agenda, as it emphasizes teaching with short excerpts
from text, rather than through creative activities or reading entire books. In
theory, teachers are encouraged to be creative and do interesting projects with
students, but in practice they have been pressured not to, because of the
introduction of punitive teacher assessments and rankings that came as part of
the package state governments agreed to when they accepted money from Duncan
and Obama’s RTTT grants. As the DFER
document mentioned earlier explains:

“‘The
politics of teacher evaluations changed instantly and forever when President
Obama made improved teacher evaluations a cornerstone of his federal ‘Race To
The Top’ initiative. ‘If we are honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that in too
many places we have no way – at least no good way – of distinguishing good
teachers from bad ones,’ Obama said, in unveiling the RTTT competition. ‘Let me
be clear: success should be judged by results and data is a powerful tool to
determine results. We can’t ignore facts. We can’t ignore data.’

“In states, Republican and
Democratic governors such as New York’s Andrew Cuomo & Florida’s Jeb Bush,
have lined up with the President’s objectives emphasizing testing, data
collection and punitive assessments as well. Last March,
Cuomo asked that student
test scores count for 50% of a teachers assessment score and that the
rest of the score be determined by outside observers, not the school principal.

“There are at least two major
problems with these policies. First, with their jobs on the line, teachers are
pressured to cut the arts, creative projects and other meaningful activities to
focus instead on test preparation and practice. Second, most professional
researchers who study these teacher evaluation methods that state
governments are using have said they are not reliable or
valid tools of assessment. They don’t really measure what federal
and state officials claim they measure.

“According to Dr.
Edward Haertal, a leading psychometrician, careful analysis of the data has
shown that individual teachers have only a small influence on student test
scores, that there are many other factors such as family, poverty and peer
pressure.

“In other words, if we take three
teachers and rotate them among three schools differing by poverty, safety,
financial resources and community/family support, the scores of students will
be more related to SES and other contextual factors then which teacher
they have. Rich children with parents who are professionals and go to schools
that have more funding will perform much better on standardized tests than poor
kids whose parents are working class or unemployed.

“What the Obama administration and
nation’s governors are purposefully ignoring is the data and research which
shows it is wealth and socio-economic status that accounts for test scores, not
‘good’ or ‘bad’ teachers. This is what most research experts believe, as the
Nation reporter Dana Goldstein wrote in
2011: ‘The research consensus has been
clear and unchanging for more than a decade: at most, teaching accounts for
about 15 percent of student achievement outcomes, while socioeconomic factors
account for about 60 percent.’

“Value-added assessments linked to
student test scores that rank and punish teachers are not reliable or valid
instruments. They do not measure what the president, secretary of education,
governors and their financial backers claim they measure. This is a critical
flaw (possibly even an intentional act of fraud) with current reform
policies, which place more importance on questionable data collection and
punitive measurements then on the professional expertise of educators, whose
understanding is grounded in decades of slow and careful research.

“The goal of
scientific research in the field education is to give us a deeper
understanding of the complex factors (social, cultural, psychological,
economic, etc.) impacting on students’ lives and learning. To ignore such
knowledge, when it exists, in ways that are harmful to teachers and
children should (in my professional opinion) be regarded as an act of negligence.

“The Obama administration and their
wealthy corporate supporters are applying scientific methods in
potentially destructive and inappropriate ways. When this is done in the field
of medicine it is called malpractice.
Teaching is an art form rooted in the wise and careful use of research and
assessment tools. Teachers give tests, but they are trained to assess
carefully, much as doctors and nurses learn to use care with needles and
surgical knives.

“When government policy makers and their corporate
sponsors continue to implement evaluation methods that lack scientific validity and
are criticized by education professionals they are embarking on a very
dangerous nation-wide experiment. Focusing their attention on data collection,
rigid standards and high-stakes testing creates the illusion of knowledge and
control.

“It allows people who lack
professional understanding and expertise in the field of education to assert
that they have it. They are implementing a marketing
strategy that treats children and teachers like
employees or commodities, ignoring the fact that schools are
not a market place, and that children are not data points on a sales
chart. They are making fraudulent claims, misusing scientific measures,
reducing financial support for what is actually most important and
measuring what is not easily quantifiable with numbers.

When President Obama decided to
ignore his anti-testing promises before the 2008 election and became ‘willing
to embrace’ policies not ‘in line with the priorities’ and expertise of
America’s teachers, he was getting into bed with shady Wall Street
investors perpetrating what journalist David Sirota called in Salon magazine, September
12, 2011 the ‘Bait and Switch’ of the ‘Great Education Myth.’ As Sirota
described it:

“‘The
bottom line is clear: In attempting to change the mission of public education
from one focused on educating kids to one focused on generating private profit,
corporate leaders in the ‘reform’ movement are pursuing a shrewd investment
strategy. Millions of dollars go into campaign contributions and propaganda
outfits that push “reform,” and, if successful, those ‘reforms’ guarantee Wall
Street and their investment vehicles much bigger returns for the long haul.’

“In order to do this successfully,
our nation’s leaders and their wealthy supporters made a conscious decision to
ignore the input and criticism of America’s education professionals. They
began making fraudulent
claims that had no evidence to back it up, manufacturing and cherry
picking data that supported their agenda, ignoring decades
of careful research and innovation that already existed in the field of
education.

“‘We
cannot ignore facts,’ the President said, and yet
that is exactly what they have done, betraying America’s teachers, parents and
students. Investing in money making schemes rather than the nation’s public
education system. Betraying the hopes and dreams of the very people that helped
get the President elected. If something is not done to change this situation
soon it won’t be just education advisor Linda Darling-Hammond who was thrown
under the bus, but an entire generation of American teachers and their
students.”

—Christopher Chase

For the entire article, Fraud at the Heart of Current Education
Reform by Christopher Chase, click here.

Teacher/Poet/Musician

Copyrights & Fair Use: This blog contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material available in my efforts to advance understanding of issues vital to a democracy. I believe this constitutes a “fair use” of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law.

Persona

"I want everything to be explained to me or nothing. And reason is impotent when it hears this cry from the heart. The mind aroused by this insistence seeks and finds nothing but contradiction and nonsense" —Albert Camus (1913-1960).